By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- President Obama will be there at the end. Almost two dozen Duke University students and faculty have been there from the beginning.

The students and staffers are blogging from the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 -- more commonly known as the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The local Cop 15 delegation is offering "personal notes" on what is happening not just on "hot" issues, like cap and trade and carbon equity, but also on a broader range of subjects.

The blogging site is called Good Cop, Bad Cop, but, so far, the bloggers have seen mostly good.

Before the conference even began, on Monday, Courtney Shephard, a graduate student at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, blogged on how she had seen the term "Hopenhagen" used quite a bit.

"The play on words may be a little cutesy," she wrote, "but positivity is absolutely necessary on the eve of the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference."

Jeannette Sorice, a student in the joint master's program at the Nicholas School and the Fuqua School of Business, wondered, more philosophically, about "how green is it to attend a climate change conference?"

"What did it take for me to get here?" she asked rhetorically, then answered:

- A 10-mile drive to the train station

- A 25-mile train ride on New Jersey Transit

- A short trip on the Airtrain monorail from the station to Newark Airport

- A 3,849-mile plane ride on Continental Airlines

- And 9 miles on the Metro in Copenhagen

A professor from the Fuqua School responded that Sorice had raised a good question.

"I have no idea what the total carbon footprint for COP 15 is," Bob Clement said. "It is not insignificant. Electricity in Denmark is pretty green -- lots of renewables -- so I'm not worried about that. The killer, though, is the air travel for everyone.

"All that said, the UNFCCC conferences are important. If there is one conference that does need to go on if we are to reach a global cooperative agreement on climate change, it's Copenhagen and the inevitable follow-ups."

The Copenhagen delegation also includes top administrators at Duke's Nicholas School, including Tim Profeta, director of the school's Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and Brian Murray, director for economic analysis at the institute.

The blog is at www.nicholas.duke.edu/cop15.